In recent times, the multi-channel audio reproduction technique is becoming more and more important. This may be due to the fact that audio compression/encoding techniques such as the well-known mp3 technique have made it possible to distribute audio records via the Internet or other transmission channels having a limited bandwidth. The mp3 coding technique has become so famous because of the fact that it allows distribution of all the records in a stereo format, i.e., a digital representation of the audio record including a first or left stereo channel and a second or right stereo channel.
Nevertheless, there are basic shortcomings of conventional two-channel sound systems. Therefore, the surround technique has been developed. A recommended multi-channel-surround representation includes, in addition to the two stereo channels L and R, an additional center channel C and two surround channels Ls, Rs. This reference sound format is also referred to as three/two-stereo, which means three front channels and two surround channels. Generally, five transmission channels are required. In a playback environment, at least five speakers at the respective five different places are needed to get an optimum sweet spot in a certain distance from the five well-placed loudspeakers.
Several techniques are known in the art for reducing the amount of data required for transmission of a multi-channel audio signal. Such techniques are called joint stereo techniques.
To this end, reference is made to FIG. 10, which shows a joint stereo device 60. This device can be a device implementing e.g. intensity stereo (IS) or binaural cue coding (BCC). Such a device generally receives—as an input—at least two channels (CH1, CH2, . . . CHn), and outputs a single carrier channel and parametric data. The parametric data are defined such that, in a decoder, an approximation of an original channel (CH1, CH2, . . . CHn) can be calculated.
Normally, the carrier channel will include subband samples, spectral coefficients, time domain samples etc, which provide a comparatively fine representation of the underlying signal, while the parametric data do not include such samples of spectral coefficients but include control parameters for controlling a certain reconstruction algorithm such as weighting by multiplication, time shifting, frequency shifting, . . . The parametric data, therefore, include only a comparatively coarse representation of the signal or the associated channel. Stated in numbers, the amount of data required by a carrier channel will be in the range of 60- 70 kbit/s, while the amount of data required by parametric side information for one channel will be in the range of 1.5- 2.5 kbit/s. An example for parametric data are the well-known scale factors, intensity stereo information or binaural cue parameters as will be described below.
Intensity stereo coding is described in AES preprint 3799, “Intensity Stereo Coding”, J. Herre, K. H. Brandenburg, D. Lederer, February 1994, Amsterdam. Generally, the concept of intensity stereo is based on a main axis transform to be applied to the data of both stereophonic audio channels. If most of the data points are concentrated around the first principle axis, a coding gain can be achieved by rotating both signals by a certain angle prior to coding. This is, however, not always true for real stereophonic production techniques. Therefore, this technique is modified by excluding the second orthogonal component from transmission in the bit stream. Thus, the reconstructed signals for the left and right channels consist of differently weighted or scaled versions of the same transmitted signal. Nevertheless, the reconstructed signals differ in their amplitude but are identical regarding their phase information. The energy-time envelopes of both original audio channels, however, are preserved by means of the selective scaling operation, which typically operates in a frequency selective manner. This conforms to the human perception of sound at high frequencies, where the dominant spatial cues are determined by the energy envelopes.
Additionally, in practically implementations, the transmitted signal, i.e. the carrier channel is generated from the sum signal of the left channel and the right channel instead of rotating both components. Furthermore, this processing, i.e., generating intensity stereo parameters for performing the scaling operation, is performed frequency selective, i.e., independently for each scale factor band, i.e., encoder frequency partition. Preferably, both channels are combined to form a combined or “carrier” channel, and, in addition to the combined channel, the intensity stereo information is determined which depend on the energy of the first channel, the energy of the second channel or the energy of the combined or channel.
The BCC technique is described in AES convention paper 5574, “Binaural cue coding applied to stereo and multi-channel audio compression”, C. Faller, F. Baumgarte, May 2002, Munich. In BCC encoding, a number of audio input channels are converted to a spectral representation using a DFT based transform with overlapping windows. The resulting uniform spectrum is divided into non-overlapping partitions each having an index. Each partition has a bandwidth proportional to the equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB). The inter-channel level differences (ICLD) and the inter-channel time differences (ICTD) are estimated for each partition for each frame k. The ICLD and ICTD are quantized and coded resulting in a BCC bit stream. The inter-channel level differences and inter-channel time differences are given for each channel relative to a reference channel. Then, the parameters are calculated in accordance with prescribed formulae, which depend on the certain partitions of the signal to be processed.
At a decoder-side, the decoder receives a mono signal and the BCC bit stream. The mono signal is transformed into the frequency domain and input into a spatial synthesis block, which also receives decoded ICLD and ICTD values. In the spatial synthesis block, the BCC parameters (ICLD and ICTD) values are used to perform a weighting operation of the mono signal in order to synthesize the multi-channel signals, which, after a frequency/time conversion, represent a reconstruction of the original multi-channel audio signal.
In case of BCC, the joint stereo module 60 is operative to output the channel side information such that the parametric channel data are quantized and encoded ICLD or ICTD parameters, wherein one of the original channels is used as the reference channel for coding the channel side information.
Normally, the carrier channel is formed of the sum of the participating original channels.
Naturally, the above techniques only provide a mono representation for a decoder, which can only process the carrier channel, but is not able to process the parametric data for generating one or more approximations of more than one input channel.
To transmit the five channels in a compatible way, i.e., in a bitstream format, which is also understandable for a normal stereo decoder, the so-called matrixing technique has been used as described in “MUSICAM surround: a universal multi-channel coding system compatible with ISO 11172-3”, G. Theile and G. Stoll, AES preprint 3403, October 1992, San Francisco. The five input channels L, R, C, Ls, and Rs are fed into a matrixing device performing a matrixing operation to calculate the basic or compatible stereo channels Lo, Ro, from the five input channels. In particular, these basic stereo channels Lo/Ro are calculated as set out below:Lo=L+xC+yLs Ro=R+xC+yRs x and y are constants. The other three channels C, Ls, Rs are transmitted as they are in an extension layer, in addition to a basic stereo layer, which includes an encoded version of the basic stereo signals Lo/Ro. With respect to the bitstream, this Lo/Ro basic stereo layer includes a header, information such as scale factors and subband samples. The multi-channel extension layer, i.e., the central channel and the two surround channels are included in the multi-channel extension field, which is also called ancillary data field.
At a decoder-side, an inverse matrixing operation is performed in order to form reconstructions of the left and right channels in the five-channel representation using the basic stereo channels Lo, Ro and the three additional channels. Additionally, the three additional channels are decoded from the ancillary information in order to obtain a decoded five-channel or surround representation of the original multi-channel audio signal.
Another approach for multi-channel encoding is described in the publication “Improved MPEG-2 audio multi-channel encoding”, B. Grill, J. Herre, K. H. Brandenburg, E. Eberlein, J. Koller, J. Mueller, AES preprint 3865, February 1994, Amsterdam, in which, in order to obtain backward compatibility, backward compatible modes are considered. To this end, a compatibility matrix is used to obtain two so-called downmix channels Lc, Rc from the original five input channels. Furthermore, it is possible to dynamically select the three auxiliary channels transmitted as ancillary data.
In order to exploit stereo irrelevancy, a joint stereo technique is applied to groups of channels, e.g. the three front channels, i.e., for the left channel, the right channel and the center channel. To this end, these three channels are combined to obtain a combined channel. This combined channel is quantized and packed into the bitstream. Then, this combined channel together with the corresponding joint stereo information is input into a joint stereo decoding module to obtain joint stereo decoded channels, i.e., a joint stereo decoded left channel, a joint stereo decoded right channel and a joint stereo decoded center channel. These joint stereo decoded channels are, together with the left surround channel and the right surround channel input into a compatibility matrix block to form the first and the second downmix channels Lc, Rc. Then, quantized versions of both downmix channels and a quantized version of the combined channel are packed into the bitstream together with joint stereo coding parameters.
Using intensity stereo coding, therefore, a group of independent original channel signals is transmitted within a single portion of “carrier” data. The decoder then reconstructs the involved signals as identical data, which are rescaled according to their original energy-time envelopes. Consequently, a linear combination of the transmitted channels will lead to results, which are quite different from the original downmix. This applies to any kind of joint stereo coding based on the intensity stereo concept. For a coding system providing compatible downmix channels, there is a direct consequence: The reconstruction by dematrixing, as described in the previous publication, suffers from artifacts caused by the imperfect reconstruction. Using a so-called joint stereo predistortion scheme, in which a joint stereo coding of the left, the right and the center channels is performed before matrixing in the encoder, alleviates this problem. In this way, the dematrixing scheme for reconstruction introduces fewer artifacts, since, on the encoder-side, the joint stereo decoded signals have been used for generating the downmix channels. Thus, the imperfect reconstruction process is shifted into the compatible downmix channels Lc and Rc, where it is much more likely to be masked by the audio signal itself.
Although such a system has resulted in fewer artifacts because of dematrixing on the decoder-side, it nevertheless has some drawbacks. A drawback is that the stereo-compatible downmix channels Lc and Rc are derived not from the original channels but from intensity stereo coded/decoded versions of the original channels. Therefore, data losses because of the intensity stereo coding system are included in the compatible downmix channels. A stereo-only decoder, which only decodes the compatible channels rather than the enhancement intensity stereo encoded channels, therefore, provides an output signal, which is affected by intensity stereo induced data losses.
Additionally, a full additional channel has to be transmitted besides the two downmix channels. This channel is the combined channel, which is formed by means of joint stereo coding of the left channel, the right channel and the center channel. Additionally, the intensity stereo information to reconstruct the original channels L, R, C from the combined channel also has to be transmitted to the decoder. At the decoder, an inverse matrixing, i.e., a dematrixing operation is performed to derive the surround channels from the two downmix channels. Additionally, the original left, right and center channels are approximated by joint stereo decoding using the transmitted combined channel and the transmitted joint stereo parameters. It is to be noted that the original left, right and center channels are derived by joint stereo decoding of the combined channel.